In this case sticks and stones will not break our bones; they will enhance our brain development.
This week in The Den we have been exploring concepts of Mathematics; how sticks and stones can make many different patterns and shapes; when explaining to the children what we would be doing in group work this week their little faces lit up with excitement, many were excited that we’d brought forest school indoors…some even looked up and said “sticks belong outside!” They knew straight away what they had to do with the sticks and stones before, and adult’s had chance to explain properly, they were busy making camp fires and houses along with the occasional boat.
Some children understood the concept and would line their sticks up into neat little rows with a pattern of stick, stone, stick, stone and were very happy and pleased with what they had made, but some children moved onto pile their sticks and stones. Once the children had investigated for themselves, an adult would slowly encourage maybe trying to make a shape or an object of their choice.
Many of the children decided to make campfires and houses as their object of choice, using a range of sticks and stones to complete their final masterpiece before turning to an adult and excitedly saying “look at what I’ve made!!” We looked at what shape or size the sticks and stones were investigating what would be best to use for our creations…in the end we decided that short sticks were best used for windows on houses or the door but the long sticks were more useful for the building and roof. To make our campfires we used lots of big and little stones to build the fire up, we then added long and short sticks on top.
A few of the children decided to challenge themselves and attempted to make shapes with their sticks, triangles, squares and funny shaped circles that’s for sure! Once we realised that the circles weren’t going to be accomplished by using sticks we moved onto stones which was a much easier and simpler way of going about it.
Our Den children would have happily sat for hours making new creations as they discovered what they could make with sticks and stones, we have had lots of fun bringing the outdoors in this week and seeing what can be done with a range of different materials!
Katie